Light at last on a peach of a play

Debra Oswald is used to waiting a long time to see her work staged,
writes Clare Morgan.

Timing can be a funny thing. After long periods wondering if
some of her plays would ever see the light of day, Debra Oswald
suddenly has two works in rehearsal and about to hit the stage.

The successful 2004 Griffin Theatre production of Mr Bailey's
Minder goes on tour next month while The Peach Season
opens the company's 2006 season around the same time.

The Peach Season won last year's Rodney Seaborn
Playwrights Award, the $10,000 prize allowing Oswald to workshop
the play and "take it away and fix it up without eating into our
precious rehearsal time".

It tells the story of Celia (Anne Looby) and daughter Zoe (Maeve
Dermody), who live on an isolated peach farm. Celia fled Sydney
with her new baby 16 years earlier after the death of her husband,
a bystander at a bungled armed robbery. But Zoe feels smothered by
her mum's over-protectiveness. When Sheena (Alice Parkinson) and
her troubled brother Kieran (Scott Timmins) arrive for picking
work, love blossoms between the youngsters but it sets off a
terrible chain of events.

"I was thinking a lot about that fear we all have about the
universe snatching away the people we love, that feeling of how you
want to protect people but not in a way that stops them
experiencing life to the full, whether you're a parent or a friend
or a lover or a sibling," says Oswald.

"And I've always wanted to write something about growing food.
There's something very beautiful and sensual and earthy about it
that I love."

Oswald, the mother of two teenage boys with Herald
columnist Richard Glover, says the work wasn't spurred by maternal
angst. "The play was written in 2002, so the actual issues in my
life now are different to those in the play. It's always a
mysterious mix of old ideas that have been sitting around for a
long time and then colliding with new ideas. Some kind of alchemy
happens and it turns into a story."

The peach farm is a Garden of Eden for Celia and Zoe until the
outside world intrudes, but Oswald says the collision of those
worlds is a catalyst for good things as well as bad. "Things like
first love, people growing up, going out into the world. The
painful part about letting people go and live is that you have to
sit with the idea that they might not be safe and they might not be
happy. There's no guarantee."

The counter is the possibilities that accompany any pain.

"Loss of innocence is always going to be a mixed thing. It's
always going to involve a sense of loss but also new possibilities,
so it's never going to be a simple hopeful thing."

Oswald doesn't want the play to be seen as being about
parenting. "It's about all kinds of relationships, about people who
care for someone and want to look after them."

She also hopes for some sizzle on stage, thanks to the
combination of passionate first love (yes, there is pashing
involved), the heat of summer and water splashing over hot
bodies.

From her first radio play, when she was 16, Oswald has made her
living from writing, be it for film, television, stage and radio or
children's books.

After her breakthrough with Dags in 1987, her stage
writing career has ebbed and flowed, and she admits to the
occasional bout of despair.

"Each of my plays has taken three to four years to get produced.
There have been long gaps in between where I've thought 'Oh well,
that's it. It's over,"' she says. "Sometimes my response is
despair, but then you have a work staged and it's put in front of
an audience and it's intoxicating and you think 'I want this
again.' In spite of all logic, you want to do it again."

Two television miniseries she wrote last year are sitting in the
drawers of two networks, with no sign of being made. Given the
networks' disinclination to produce Australian drama, she's not
holding her breath.

But she's used to the waiting. In an interview with the
Herald in 2004, the artistic director of the Griffin
Theatre, David Berthold, named Oswald as one of the playwrights who
had been ignored by theatre companies. "We neglect Louis Nowra and
Stephen Sewell and Debra Oswald despite them being well-known
names. Those writers still write but their plays are not actually
done," he said then.

Oswald says with a laugh that it's difficult to feel neglected
with two plays showing simultaneously, but admits to some
frustration in the past.

"That's why the Griffin is so precious - because it is the only
Australian company staging new Australian plays. I'm not going to
say it's easy for theatre companies. I understand the economic
reality of it, but I think it's important for our own theatre
culture that we have our own works on stage. The independent
theatre scene in Sydney is very vigorous but it's no replacement
for mainstage companies putting on Australian works."

The Peach Season opens at the SBW Stables Theatre,
Kings Cross, on March 16.

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Fruits of drama ... Debra Oswald was keen to explore our fears
about love and loss.